What I Once Believed
Three Movements
I. What I Believed
I thought the gods were generous,
that Demeter's grief was temporary,
that the seeds held more than they spent,
that even the underworld
gave back what it took.
I believed love was a country
you could learn the language of,
that the body was a door
and not a burning house,
that hunger, if you fed it honestly,
would one day fold its hands.
I was that girl standing at the river's edge
naming the water as if names were enough.
The light on the surface so bright
I mistook it for depth.
II. What Life Revealed
The fracture was not sudden.
It came the way rivers carve stone,
slowly, with great patience,
until one morning you look down
and see the canyon you are standing in.
I learned that Orpheus turned around
not from weakness, but from love
that couldn't believe in what it couldn't see.
I have turned around.
I have lost what I turned to look at.
I have kept walking anyway.
I named each one carefully,
the way you name a river
before you cross it.
The naming changed nothing.
I crossed anyway.
Time is not a healer.
Time is just the light
that keeps changing
on the same still water.
III. What Remains
What remains is this body,
still capable of heat,
still moving toward light
the way water moves,
not because it chooses
but because it is water.
I have become Aspasia,
not the woman who was forgotten
but the dragon she becomes
in the long telling:
clawed, necessary, curled
around the one bright thing
she will not relinquish.
I know now that shadow and light
are not opposites.
They are the same hand
writing the same word
in two different inks.
What I believe now
is smaller and more durable,
the way bronze outlasts the sculptor,
the way a raven knows
without being told
that the carcass is also a feast.
I am still here.
Still sensual, still seeking,
still that girl at the river,
only now I know
the light on the surface
is also beautiful
even if it is only surface.
Even the surface
holds the sky.
Dragon Sculpture and Poem © Gesso Cocteau
